Will the Ghost Away
by niennah
Summary: Willow remembers Warren. Set midseason 7 sometime, with flashbacks to preseason 1. WillowWarren, 11


Title: Will the Ghost Away  
Author: Anna  
Rating: R  
Pairing: Willow/Warren (mentions Willow/Tara, Willow/Oz, Warren/Andrew)  
Disclaimer: Nothing's mine but the words.  
Summary: Willow remembers Warren. Set mid-season 7 sometime, with flashbacks to pre-season 1.  
Feedback: Yes please.   
______________________________  
  
She hoods her eyes when they mention Tara even though she knows they know how much it hurts. She covers it anyway.   
  
Because they don't know the details.   
  
It was a long time ago and she had long wanted to forget. His eyes had been too cold that night, too mercenary when they looked at her naked skin and shy breasts. He had run his hand over her and it sounded like paper. He knew too much, his year on her made him too knowledgeable about things she had tried not to think of. Not even when it came to Xander.   
  
But Warren, he had seen her. He had raised her hair from her shoulders one night after the Bronze and told her she was pretty and for a short time she was smitten with this man, at least her equal in intelligence and beyond her in years and worldliness. Warren could talk, he could always talk, and she felt, when he looked at her with those dark eyes, that she was the only thing he wanted to see. When he wrapped his arm around her, walking her home, she felt with some alarm but more arousal and deep, warm pleasure his hand on her waist, the pressure of his fingertips telling her that he liked his hand there, tucked into a curve of her femininity. He made her feel seductive.   
  
It hadn't lasted long, just a few weeks of furtive kissing, of leaving Xander and Jesse at the pool table or dancing by the stage and beating a path for the door under the guise of a headache or homework or insane study that always passed the escape test with those two, because she was Willow, the quiet one, the one who spent too long with her books and not enough time shopping or pretending at the Bronze that soda was as fun as the other smells coming from the bar.   
  
She didn't need the other things you could get at the Bronze. Warren was always waiting outside, a gleam in his eyes that she took for pleasure at seeing her. Maybe it was. When she recalled it now it was hard and frightening, a look perfectly moulded to fit the face that killed her lover.   
  
Everyone said the bullet was a stray, a ricochet, a frantic shot behind him as he fled his own crime scene. She could not convince herself. Warren never used a weapon he didn't know how to handle.   
  
He knew how to handle her. He brushed the back of his fingers against her cheek and she leaned into his hand wanting more. He kissed her lightly, and it was she who opened her lips. Any invitation in this town is dangerous. His mouth was soft and hers was pliable and he taught her how to kiss with greed. His basement hummed under its breath because he never turned his computers off. A screensaver glowed palely in the eerie gloom, and he undressed her under its half light. Skin can only be white at times like this. His was ghostly and he was hairy, and she had never imagined liking that but she did. It was more proof of his adulthood while she tried to smooth out her virgin fumbling. She tried to imitate his suavity but it came out like immaturity. She felt exposed and amateur.   
  
He held her hands to his heart and reassured her with his mouth and eyes. He kissed her tenderly and unpeeled her layers, all childish buttons and zips and she desperately ached to wear something more grown up and suitable. This moment would never come again.   
  
She had tasted him in the back of her throat when she had told Oz before graduation that it was her first time. She had pushed him away, gagged him. What she told Oz was the truth. Oz would never look at her that way.   
  
He kissed her everywhere, and she had never imagined the feeling of a man's mouth in places she was still reluctant to touch. He was tearing her naivety away with hands and mouth and the grate of new stubble against her inner thigh, and there was nothing she wanted more than to feel the secret things Warren gave her with every touch.   
  
She recognised the look in his eyes only when he finally entered her. Not even a moonstruck young thing could mistake the ownership in that gleam. She was suddenly afraid and angry at herself for being afraid at a time like this. She was wrong, Warren had told her he loved her. Not in so many words. In all the nothings he whispered to her, the secret looks in acrid school corridors and the dark trysts, stake in his back pocket, because he was no fool and he'd protect her from the strangers in this town. He loved her and he was making love to her, not rendering her used and soon useless, and not counting her another thing.   
  
Though that was what his eyes said.   
  
Afterwards he wrapped himself around her in his bed and held her close and she almost relaxed again. His sincerity and sleepy whisperings muffled her silly doubts. The first time can never be perfect, she told herself quietly.   
  
In school the following Monday he smiled at her with lessening intimacy, as if the knowledge they had secretly shared for weeks had been dissipated and there was no longer any need to maintain their bubble of seduction. Xander and Jesse bounced along beside her and demanded to know what was wrong in the world of Willow but she smiled and told them, nothing, nothing, she was fine. Just a little tired.   
  
No major surprise, Will, they laughed, with all the study you been doing lately. You should chill, take it easy. Come to the Bronze later.   
  
They sat under the sun and she agreed and over there, the other side of the quad, Warren was talking to that blond kid, kind of gangly, who looked a bit like Tucker Wells. He was wide eyed and Warren was brimful of charm, talking the way he could, his eyes full of conviction.   
  
She wondered if she had ever looked like that kid.   
  
Two weeks before Buffy arrived in Sunnydale, Warren left for another high school, one that would properly exercise that brain of his. Willow thought how much she would like to go to a school like that, but no one asked her. She watched the blond kid biting his lip as he walked morose and unseeing in the corridors. He barely heard the jocks when they laughed at him. She wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say.   
  
He was in the Summers' kitchen now, gingerly taking a Hot Pocket out of the new microwave.   
  
And Warren was dead.   
  
He still whispered to her in bed, words that smelled of acacia and wrapped her in his fairytale. Some nights the moon flayed the sleepless darkness in great white swathes and, stepping softly to the kitchen, she remembered the humming light in his basement.   
  
Often Andrew joined her. He would open a bottle of something red and pour tawny glasses of cheap forgetfulness and then they would sit at the breakfast bar, mostly silently, trying to will the ghost away.   
  
Sometimes, when the bottle was nearly empty and the candle burned low in the glow of imminent dawn, they almost believed they could.   



End file.
